Josh Barro, Columnist

The Real Conservative Echo Chamber

February 22, 2013 at 3:48 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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The James Madison Institute, a conservative think tank in Florida, has a new poll out that purports to show that 59 percent of Floridians oppose the Medicaid expansion that Republican Governor Rick Scott just endorsed. It's a push poll. And it's a great example of the phenomenon that keeps making conservatives stupider on both politics and policy.

First, let's discuss why this poll is a push poll. It starts by priming respondents with questions about the national debt and the size of Florida's existing Medicaid budget.